Flash storage components, such as NAND and NOR flash storage components, are often composed of, or can optionally be configured with, discrete physical regions each having different characteristics. The characteristics include different block, page, and sector sizes, unique read/write/erase performance attributes, and the ability to read-only, read/write, or write-once, for example.
Conventional software file systems view flash components as single, heterogeneous sets of sectors or clusters without consideration of the different regions' characteristics. There is no standard mechanism for exposing flash region information pertaining to each region and its properties to a file system. This leads to an inefficient utilization and performance of the flash components.